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Post your latest DX

Heard something interesting on 1160 AM this evening as I was sitting in a parking lot near the middle of Phoenix. At first I thought KSL had flipped formats, because what I heard was not English. The HD indicator was lit, though not being decoded (the radio in my Mazda indicates HD on AM if it can ‘hear’ the transmission, even if it’s not strong enough to decide). Once the music ended, I was able to hear the interesting bit.

What I was hearing was NOT Spanish, though the song had been. It was a very interesting language, with occasional similarities to a couple of the American Indian languages I hear in Arizona, but it was clearly NOT Navajo nor Hopi nor any of the Colorado River Indian Tribes languages I happen to have heard. It also had curious tonal variations that I expect change word meanings. They eventually flipped to Spanish and gave a station identifier. It was XEQIN / XHSQB out of San Quintín, Baja California, and it was burying KSL (which I could hear slightly, down underneath).

I know XEQIN is said (by Wikipedia, so I’ve no idea whether accurate) to broadcast Mixtec, Zapotec, and Triqui language programming, so I suppose the language was one of those. It was neat!

Then I started the car and moved a couple feet and it was almost completely gone. KSL’s HD broadcast snapped the radio over to digital, and now I can’t get more than a hint of XEQIN back. It was neat for those few moments!

BTW, does anyone know what XEQIN’s nighttime power transmission level is supposed to be?
 
XEQIN was heard here a few years ago during an auroral event. KSL was very weak and they came in. Yes, they air a lot of native Mexican language programming.
 
Last night around 9:45 PM CST I was able to partially null WLS on 890 and in background I could hear a station in Spanish language. At first I thought it was Cuba, but it turned out to be WYAM Hartselle, Alabama playing Mexican ranchera music. The only way to ID the station was matching it to the web stream.
 
CADXER said:
Last night around 9:45 PM CST I was able to partially null WLS on 890 and in background I could hear a station in Spanish language. At first I thought it was Cuba, but it turned out to be WYAM Hartselle, Alabama playing Mexican ranchera music. The only way to ID the station was matching it to the web stream.
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Another daytime only pulling an all nighter. Good catch!
 
Yes, the last few days I noticed quite a few stations operating with day power at night, such as WQXI (790), WMGY (800), WCKA (810), WUBR (910), WHIN (1010), WONQ (1030)
 
We should start a thread just logging all the stations that "cheat" every night.
 
I just flashed-back on a small station that leased space in our building in it's early days. The station owner (or maybe Sales Manager) wouldn't pay for parking in the building garage, or in the lot across the street, so he would just back his car in to the driveway of the exit across the street. That way, he was on the "public side" of the crossarm, and felt he was exempt from the rules. They gave up arguing with him, and built a flower bed there one weekend.
 
This morning between 7:00-7:10am CST in my car on my way to a meeting here in Overland Park, Kansas, I logged KLIF in Dallas, Texas on 570 kHz. They overcame WNAX which is typically dominate during this time of day. I suspect KLIF was already on their day power of 5 kW when I logged them. They are a 2-tower directional with different patterns, day and night.

With excellent ground conductivity, KLIF puts out a great daytime signal footprint:

KLIF-AM Radio Station Coverage Map

Bob
 
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Heard WGNY 1220 Newburgh, NY consistently from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM EST while visiting Petoskey, MI and driving around there. No hint of WHKW 1220 Cleveland until about 5:45 PM EST. WGNY reduced power from 10000 watts to 180 watts, when it disappeared, and WHKW took over. WGNY has a three tower array beamed straight West, where the IDF is close to the equivalent of 50 kW based on 282 mV/m @ 1 km @ 1 kW as a reference.
 
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kenglish said:
We should start a thread just logging all the stations that "cheat" every night.
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And you wonder why some stations dont respond to DXers?

Regularly I see DX'ers say "Must be at day power" or "Sounds like theyre cheating... when you obviously cant prove it. I see it regularly where it isn't so so so other worldly away from normal that it cant be conditions

Im in alaska and heard a central California AM with less then 100 watts at night.. some would say ERR MA GHERRDD.. GOTTA BE CHEATING!... Well, even if they were.. theyre only 700 watts day.

I verified with the engineer the station was powering down and in fact at 72 watts.

Fact is, DX'ers are sometimes right.. but regularly, they arent.
 
I've called several stations over the years that I suspected had forgotten to reduce power, mainly in the 1960s and 1970s, and asked whether they had reduced power. Responses ranged from, a denial, "yes we reduced power", to literally punching the button to reduce power during the call and denying it, to thanking me, to pleading with me not to turn them in. I said I wouldn't turn anyone in unless they had done something mean to me. He said, literally, "one day you might need a friend". For the record, I never turned anyone in. One engineer was a childhood neighbor and friend, who figured out who I was during the call, who rocked the phasor switches to get the oxides off, which returned the signal to a normal level in my receiver location.
 
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I was once the Chief Engineer for a station that operated at 50kW daytime and reduced power to 1kW at night.
At the time, we were using a 10kW transmitter cut back to 1kW at night. The transmitter had a major, unrepairable, failure of an audio coupling transformer. The transformer was very specific with six windings and was no longer available. To keep the station on the air and close to legal, I used the 50kW transmitter, cutting the power back as far as possible and then de-tuned the output network to achieve something close to 1kW. We operated in that mode for a couple of nights until a replacement night transmitter was delivered and installed. Whatever it takes to keep the station going. As a side note, the 50kW transmitter sounded just fine at 1kW.
 
So, when I heard WCSL 1590 Cherryville, N.C. at 3:15 a.m. CT as I was trying to fall asleep in the southwest suburbs of Chicago, was it on 10 kw day power or 30 watt night power? It was in under and sometimes equal to WCGO Evanston, Ill., 2.5 kw at night.
 
frankberry said:
I was once the Chief Engineer for a station that operated at 50kW daytime and reduced power to 1kW at night.
At the time, we were using a 10kW transmitter cut back to 1kW at night. The transmitter had a major, unrepairable, failure of an audio coupling transformer. The transformer was very specific with six windings and was no longer available. To keep the station on the air and close to legal, I used the 50kW transmitter, cutting the power back as far as possible and then de-tuned the output network to achieve something close to 1kW. We operated in that mode for a couple of nights until a replacement night transmitter was delivered and installed. Whatever it takes to keep the station going. As a side note, the 50kW transmitter sounded just fine at 1kW.
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You do what you gotta do.
I think the FCC (and most reasonable people) understand that, and many stations are cool with a bit of interference for a day or two.
It's the ones who consistently abuse the system, causing harm to other stations on the same and adjacent frequencies, night after night, that ruin it for others.
 
I wouldn't call a station and use the word "cheating", but I think engineers would like to be notified if something is awry with their signal. They can't monitor everything all the time, and they may not hear certain problems that a more-distant listener (DX'er?) can hear.
Many years ago, my FRG-7 and I heard a third-harmonic on KSL. I mentioned it to their CE the next morning. The next day, he called me at home to say the harmonic filter was smoking when they got to the site.
Also, I didn't know that KSL was using MDSL nowadays, until I got a message from Glenn Hauser. He was getting a noiser than usual signal in Enid. Turns out, noise that you might not normally hear "rushes up" when the MDSL lowers the carrier a few dB. It's a bit like "cliff effect".
I mentioned it to the retired transmitter engineer, who now is an antenna-farmer 200 miles away, and he had an "Ah-ha moment".
Same with a local station or two, who used KSL as an EAS monitor source, but with a noisy antenna signal.
An extra set of ears is nice to have, if they know what they are doing.
 
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SomeRadioGuy said:
And you wonder why some stations dont respond to DXers?

Regularly I see DX'ers say "Must be at day power" or "Sounds like theyre cheating... when you obviously cant prove it. I see it regularly where it isn't so so so other worldly away from normal that it cant be conditions

Im in alaska and heard a central California AM with less then 100 watts at night.. some would say ERR MA GHERRDD.. GOTTA BE CHEATING!... Well, even if they were.. theyre only 700 watts day.

I verified with the engineer the station was powering down and in fact at 72 watts.

Fact is, DX'ers are sometimes right.. but regularly, they arent.
Click to expand...

Some cases are questionable but others really aren't. Sometimes you'll hear one of these stations every day for a week or more and then it will disappear again, presumably once the problem has been corrected. One time I heard strongly a station that was supposedly one watt. Yes, one. Also, keep in mind that Alaska has fewer AM radio stations to hear than say the Midwest where I live, so it's likely easier for distant signals to break through.
 


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